Breadswinging & Speedrunning

[Tedronai]

I lose a precious turn. Why is this option still available?

lol. Wield a bread ration, swing it 50 times and you get the healing equal to 75 turns. And still only those 50 turns are counted towards score. This is not how you lose turn, it's how you save them :D

[magicpoints]

I lose a precious turn. Why is this option still available?

lol. Wield a bread ration, swing it 50 times and you get the healing equal to 75 turns. And still only those 50 turns are counted towards score. This is not how you lose turn, it's how you save them

Last time I tried to measure this I found it didn't work, at all. It does still work for getting rid of status effects, just not regen.

[Roderic]

Is this bread-dancing for real?

[magicpoints]

It works by exploiting the difference between turn timing for score and aut timing for actions. More aut per turn means spending less turns on aut-based needs such as resting off statuses or letting summons kill things. The only reason why it doesn't work for regen (which would be the most common use) is because of a piece of code that seems to date back to 0.7 of all versions.

Even if wielding non-weapons was removed, this would still be possible by using big weapons with 0 skill to attack the air. In fact this is already better than nonweapons for this purpose as it can be slower than 1.5 aut.

[dck]

lots of insufferably smug people continue to bring it up as if it was some long lost art so it must work
I'd be all for this if it would shut them up but then they'd just talk about walking in puddles or zerodiches or whatever so it's not worth losing the funny screenshots

[tabstorm]

I lose a precious turn. Why is this option still available?

lol. Wield a bread ration, swing it 50 times and you get the healing equal to 75 turns. And still only those 50 turns are counted towards score. This is not how you lose turn, it's how you save them

Last time I tried to measure this I found it didn't work, at all. It does still work for getting rid of status effects, just not regen.

It does work, just only when you swing weapons. Walking is special cased presumably so you don't get extra regen as a Naga or with Chei, afaik. In wizmode testing I found:

over 20 turns:
Waiting heals about 7-8 hp
Swinging bread heals 10-11 HP
Swinging a 0-skill claymore, bardiche, etc. yields 13-14 HP

I imagine these effects are more noticeable with regen. If wielding useless items goes, it won't really affect healing per turn manipulation since you can always swing a 0 skill big weapon at nothing. If you wanted to leave that in, you could also just prompt the player for a Y/N before they wield a non-weapon.

[magicpoints]

I had previously tested walking versus walking with slow status versus walking in water. If it's special-cased to be just walking that regens poorly, then that's twice as stupid.

[tabstorm]

In fact chei naga walk in shallow water for 20 turns heals 7-8 hp, same as resting or normal walking would.

Edit: Even if you changed healing to be per-turn like walking is, it would have some consequences like buffing quickblades. Imagine for instance a VS using a quickblade with a regen source or two. By the time most enemies get a turn off, you would heal about 10HP per monster turn.

[tasonir]

Truly dedicated speedrunners who want to regen faster know the best action to take is to ascend/descend stairs. You're welcome

[duvessa]

just switch scoring to aut already so people can stop talking about this

[tabstorm]

Truly dedicated speedrunners who want to regen faster know the best action to take is to ascend/descend stairs. You're welcome

Walking back to the stairs and then returning to where you were will be a net turn loss over for instance 0 skill claymore: 1.9 vs. 2.3

[tabstorm]

just switch scoring to aut already so people can stop talking about this

Then you would instead of bread-swining encourage hastewalking everywhere to minimize aut or using swiftness to walk around harmless areas (The idea is to be -swift while fighting monsters that aren't very dangerous, and be +swift to minimize aut when walking) not to mention having to determine score multipliers for Na, Ce, Sp, Fe, Te. So it's a bit more involved than bread swinging but some tedious things will still be present.

Even though turn count scoring has some problems in terms of encouraged tedium, I think it's overall a relatively minor thing. Bread swinging isn't essential to a good score, overall maybe it will save you something like 500 turns over the course of a run.

Edit: Also, you would need to remove boots of running, since that would give a great advantage in aut over the course of a game.

[PleasingFungus]

Speedrunning is completely irrelevant to this conversation. Whether or not this change will be made has nothing to do with the impact on speedrunners, and everyone talking about 'breadswinging' is wasting their time and filling the thread with nonsense.

[dck]

A +11 hand axe of electrocution in D: 5 will also provide a great advantage in aut over the course of a game.
How speedrunners amuse themselves within the existing game should also not be a main concern (and indeed I dread the day design decisions would be guided by such matters).

[tabstorm]

A +11 hand axe of electrocution in D: 5 will also provide a great advantage in aut over the course of a game.
How speedrunners amuse themselves within the existing game should also not be a main concern (and indeed I dread the day design decisions would be guided by such matters).

It's true that your final score has a lot to do with lucky drops on a speedrun, but somehow I feel that with an aut scoring system runboots would be quite troublesome. For instance, if you do a 15 runer in 40k turns, and find runboots in Lair around 10k, you basically save 3k aut just walking around over someone who dosen't have them under autscoring. I'd at least like to think that for instance, by finding a strong weapon or armour early, a player who saves time does so by placing themselves in more tactically difficult situations earlier and earlier.

Of course boots of running could just be removed for being overpowered or encouraging tedious behavior anyway, independent of what scoring system you use. But even though I like doing speedruns I agree that the game shouldn't be built around it.

[Leafsnail]

Edit: Even if you changed healing to be per-turn like walking is, it would have some consequences like buffing quickblades. Imagine for instance a VS using a quickblade with a regen source or two. By the time most enemies get a turn off, you would heal about 10HP per monster turn.

You could make it per-turn but no faster than your natural regen rate (AUT-wise), I assume walking is the same.

But then I'm not sure if you should expect to avoid tedious behaviour when you're challenging yourself to try and shave off as many moves as possible by any means necessary

e: And actually honestly I think any attempt to fix this issue would just confuse the majority of non-speedrunners - why should swinging a larger weapon or walking slower make you regenerate less? Haste-walking under an AUT system would be boring but at least intuitive from a speedrunning perspective.

[and into]

Mod note: Split this off from GDD. Have fun folks.

[dck]

It doesn't seem different to me from getting any other really remarkable item at a point where it is relevant.
There are already fast races if one would want to remove the "luck based" part of scoring depending on the existence of boots of running, and it's not like when your objective is to go fast the game's races have to all stand on equal footing one to another (since they've not being designed for any of that).

[tabstorm]

It doesn't seem different to me from getting any other really remarkable item at a point where it is relevant.
There are already fast races if one would want to remove the "luck based" part of scoring depending on the existence of boots of running, and it's not like when your objective is to go fast the game's races have to all stand on equal footing one to another (since they've not being designed for any of that).

Imagine this scenario:

1. I'm playing let's say DDBe. My first DDBe finds PDA on D:3. He proceeds to rush to Orc after finding Makh's altar, hits Lair around 5k, and has 2 lair runes around 10k. This isn't a super remarkable pace by any means, I just chose 10 so that I can convert aut easier.

2. Now imagine a second DDBe that finds runboots on D:2. This character can spend a greater amount of time healing, running from fights, etc., basically placing themselves in less dangerous combat, and still have the same AUT as the first character, even though they took more turns. He saves roughly 1000 aut just by walking.

I like (1.) better because at least the player has put themselves in challenging situations sooner in order to save time as a consequence of their find. The second player can put themselves in less challenging situations and still spend the same amount of time just because of runboots.

Also, it's not like I want to remove luck entierly here, just saying that with autscoring, certain items like runboots causes luck to translate into score in a way that I think is worse than, say, an early PDA would. You still have a bunch of other items that are useful in keeping your time down. The biggest offender is ctele (since it does the same sort of thing as I explained above) but that could well be gone in 0.16 anyway.

Also, regarding different races, I, and at least a few other players I know who like to do speedruns, like to aim for species highscores instead of class ones. I mean, getting something like the #1 score is cool and all, but species is a big part of crawl's difficulty slider, so it's hard to compare the "value" of a score across species.

edit: If you are just trying to get the highest score period, my opinion is that nothing can come close to VS/DD/Sp. Of course no one wants to play nothing but those 3 races unless they are very determined to get the top score. So, maybe you try to get the fastest score with a given race, since it allows for a variety of different characters to be played.

[crate]

The real problem that tabstorm brings up is runboots are awful and should go away, imo (and this isn't just a speedrunning concern, I think the running ego for anything but nagas is legitimately bad for crawl, since speed 10 melee-only stuff is problematic enough ... turning all of those into essentially speed 9 things is unacceptable).

[tabstorm]

The real problem that tabstorm brings up is runboots are awful and should go away, imo (and this isn't just a speedrunning concern, I think the running ego for anything but nagas is legitimately bad for crawl, since speed 10 melee-only stuff is problematic enough ... turning all of those into essentially speed 9 things is unacceptable).

Well, it lets you pillardance any speed 10 enemy without threat of getting hit from energy randomization, for instance, not to mention allow you to flee eventually from any speed 10 monster. I mean, I would never actually pillardance a speed 10 monster for a long time with runboots, but someone might decide they should. Even something like making all speed 10 monsters speed 11 would be fine if it means that energy randomization goes away. At least with speed 11 you know you will get hit eventually, instead of it randomly happening.